I went back to Hofstra with a buddy of mine a few weeks ago to catch a football game and drive around the area looking for our old haunts. Something that quickly became clear is that things change as all of the stores we used to buy CDs at were gone. This is not a short list, either. Some we knew had died painful deaths, like Sam Goody, The Wall, Tower and The Wiz (yeah, I’m that old, I used to shop at The Wiz), but others we were downright shocked by. Two of my personal favorite places to find random used albums were Mr. Cheap’s, which we couldn’t for the life of us find on this trip, and Empire, which I had been selling CDs back to for years, including a boatload just two homecomings ago. As we passed by the strip mall that Empire used to stand so proudly in all we saw in its stead was a hollowed out shell of a store with a “For Lease” sign in one of the windows. It was a sad moment for a multitude of reasons.